General approach to deep inelastic scattering

Due to preliminary indications of a possible scaling violation it is interesting to clarify which of the parton light-cone results are indeed the consequences of a more general scheme. The constraints imposed by the general ideas of duality (absence of exotics in the t- channel) applied to deep inelastic single-particle distributions are considered. This provides a restrictive scheme, although it allows for a larger set of diagrams than that of the parton model. However, in a particular kinematical region where the diffractive component of the total deep inelastic cross section can be neglected, all the algebraic results of the parton model are recovered by this scheme. (16 refs).